US Patent 7092112 Ink drop printer with print engine controller

An ink drop printer driven by a print engine controller comprising: an interface at which to receive compressed page data; a contone image decoder to decode any continuous tone image planes in the received compressed page data; a bi-level decoder to decode any bi-level image planes in the received compressed page data; a half-toner/compositor to dither any continuous tone image planes and composite bi-level image plane data with any dithered image plane; a print head driver to output the composite to a print head; and a print head, wherein the contone image decoder outputs separate color planes of the decoded continuous tone image planes to separate buffers in a front end to the halftoner/compositor.